dumb and dumber stanley hotel — vs the apartment i refuse to leave

dumb and dumber stanley hotel is a film location and a real building, and i refuse to leave my apartment to visit either. the cafe across the street is far enough. the barista nodded today. the third yoga mat held the door. ice cream stays frozen for exactly four minutes here.

writing this from the desk on a tuesday at 9:14am, with the window open a finger’s width because the radiator argues with itself about whether january finished. carla is in the annual planning meeting on the third floor. that buys me, by the count i keep running, the rest of the morning. enough to compare two buildings, one of them mine.

so. let me file the geography first. the hotel that “dumb and dumber” uses for its aspen scenes is the stanley, in estes park, colorado, the same building that loaned its hallways to a much more upsetting movie from 1980. one location, two genres. comedy on the porch. horror in the corridor. you can sleep there. you can also, apparently, hear typewriting.

dumb and dumber stanley hotel is a question with a small answer: the hotel in dumb and dumber is the stanley hotel in estes park, colorado, used for the aspen lobby and exterior shots in the 1994 film. it is also the hotel that inspired stephen king’s the shining. one building. one slapstick comedy. one horror landmark. cinema is a real estate agent.

dumb and dumber stanley hotel, the cinematic location

i looked it up. not on the manual sites. on the kind of site a man at the bar named mike would trust on a slow tuesday, and mike has not filed his taxes since 2019, which i mention because mike’s standards are, in this one area, surprisingly high. the stanley is a long white building with a porch you could play tennis on if you brought a net and the wrong attitude. the film parks two of the most committed dumb characters in late-twentieth-century american comedy on that porch and lets them try to look like men of leisure. they fail. they fail very, very well. the porch survives them.

this is not, noted, a piece on the wider canon of a category, a neighborhood, a zip code i pay rent in. i wrote that pillar already. this is the sub-piece, the cinematic adjunct. the building is the angle. the building is, frankly, more interesting than several of the hot takes the movie tries to land. a building that hosts both pratfalls and ghosts has more range than the average hotel guest.

i have not been. i will not be going. travel is a tax i decline to pay. i’d rather watch the movie at a sensible distance, on a screen the size of an old phonebook, with the thermostat where i set it.

the apartment, my chosen location, comparatively

the apartment is not in colorado. the apartment is on a street with a number i won’t print. it has a kitchen, a window, a radiator, and a sofa that has been the final resting place of three yoga mats. it does not have a porch. it has, instead, a step outside the front door that is functionally a porch if you sit on it with a coffee and squint. nobody filmed there. nobody will. that is, on net, an asset.

i have spent, in this apartment, more snooze cycles than most of the stanley’s guests have spent walking its halls. i can name every sound the radiator makes. i know which floorboard creaks under a sock and which one creaks only under a shoe. that is intimate knowledge. the stanley does not offer that. the stanley charges you for a robe.

the barista who serves my cinema

across the street is a cafe with a window that fogs in the corner near the door, which means somebody is leaning on it again. the_barista (i mean the one who works mornings, not the man who covers wednesdays and gets the order wrong on purpose, i think) knows my drink and knows i will not, under any circumstances, want it to-go in a paper cup if a real one is available. she is, by my standards, a curator. the cafe serves my cinema. the apartment hosts the screenings. the third yoga mat blocks the draft from the door.

i bring up the_barista because the editorial calls for one personajes_in_scene per piece, and because i have, in three years, exchanged maybe forty words with her, which is the correct number. small talk is a gas leak. she knows what i drink, i know which days she works, that is enough. carla, by contrast, is a colleague and is meant to be social. carla gets sentences. the_barista gets nods and a smaller bowl of words.

the cafe is also where i, briefly, considered watching the movie on a laptop, before remembering that watching slapstick in public is its own form of public indecency. you laugh wrong. people look. i went home. the apartment received me without comment, the way a hotel cannot.

the third yoga mat, the only stanley i need

here is where i invoke an object. the third yoga mat lives, as previously documented, under the sofa. it has not been used for yoga. it has been used as a draft excluder, a knee pad, a small crash mat for the time the airpods (i’m down to the one) tried to commit suicide off the kitchen counter, and, on one occasion, as a sled for a heavy box of books across the laminate. it has earned its keep. it has not earned a hotel.

the stanley is, in the brand sense, a place that has earned its name several times. king built a novel in its corridors. carrey and daniels parked a moped at its doors. that is two earnings in one zip code. impressive. but a yoga mat that has done four jobs it was not designed for, in one apartment, is, structurally, the same kind of utility — fewer cameras involved. nobody will write a novel about my mat. that is, again, on net, an asset. literature is a kind of weather i’d rather watch from indoors.

i mention all of this, partly, because stefan would have notes. stefan, who has been to the stanley, who does that kind of thing, who would, given a runway, turn this into a TED talk about presence. stefan is, in this category, a stefan-type expert. i love stefan. i am also not stefan. i am the man on the sofa, four feet from the third yoga mat, with the laptop on my knees and the seventh microwave humming through the wall.

the ice cream take, briefly, since the hotel had a freezer

“ice cream is breakfast. it contains milk.” i’d like that one entered. the stanley, presumably, has a kitchen with several freezers and probably, in one of them, a tub of vanilla destined for a bowl on a porch at sunset, which is the kind of cinematic detail that gets used in a film about either ghosts or idiots, depending on which director picks it up. my freezer, which is the small drawer at the top of a fridge i should have replaced in 2022, can hold one tub of mint, one bag of peas, and a phone i once put in there to “calm it down” after it overheated, which i refuse to elaborate on.

cold pizza, by the way, is also breakfast. but ice cream is the cleaner take. ice cream is the take you can defend at a hotel breakfast buffet without anyone calling security. the stanley would understand. the stanley has seen worse. the_barista would understand only because she has, by now, given up on me.

verdict, the apartment wins on snooze count

the verdict, for the section the search bar wanted: yes, the hotel in dumb and dumber is the stanley, used for aspen exteriors in the 1994 film, and yes, it is also the hotel that hangs over the shining like a long shadow. one building, two genres, no contradictions. cinema is a real estate agent that takes both kinds of clients. the building does not have to choose. neither, frankly, do you, if you are the kind of viewer who watches both kinds of films from the same sofa, with the same blanket, in the same apartment, with the same mug.

which brings me back to the sofa. the apartment wins. it wins on snooze count. it wins on freezer access. it wins on draft management. it wins on the absence of any reasonable expectation that anyone will arrive uninvited, including ghosts. i once watched a man who left his country involuntarily and on camera on this very laptop — abroad, in the way only an idiot is forced to be, paid for and filmed — and the whole time my apartment kept being my apartment. that’s a reliable host. that’s the_landlord, in his own way, doing his job.

(brief ghost-of-cross-cluster note: that abroad man, in the show, ends up in hotels far worse than the stanley, and the apartment, watching from across the ocean, looks better with every episode. it is, mostly, why i don’t go anywhere.)

the seventh microwave is humming. the third yoga mat is exactly where i left it. the_barista, across the street, has her back to the door, which is the moment to send this. i won’t be visiting the stanley. i’ll be visiting the kettle.

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